Farm animals are frequently accommodated indoors using stalls (also referred to as cubicles or pens; the term “stalls” will be used herein). One common design of stall has a common head barrier or wall with parallel dividers projecting out to define individual spaces for animals between a pair of adjacent dividers.
Typical steel stall dividers are a basic U shape made of one piece of steel tubing bent to make the U shape. The ends of the “U” are mounted to the head end barrier (i.e. with the “U” lying on its side) and with the bottom of the “U” projecting outwards. These dividers cause injuries to the animals.
One solution is to replace the stainless steel divider with a pair of flexible plastic pipes, replacing the upper and lower rails of the steel “U” shape. Easyfix Limited, of Ballinasloe, Ireland supply such a product employing hollow polypropylene random (PP-R) co-polymer pipes, which provide a safe replacement for the conventional steel stall dividers and eliminate possible injuries to animals.
One problem encountered with this solution was that because the PP-R pipe stall system uses two open ended pipes, when young animals or animals, which were not used to a stall system, first entered the stall there was a chance of them being able to turn around in the stall and end up facing the wrong way.
It is not practical to bend an extruded PP-R pipe into a U-shape as the pipe has to be heated evenly all the way through its 12.5 mm wall thickness. This would require a huge oven capable of taking several 4 meter lengths of pipe and then bending them in a press big enough to press them into shape and hold that shape while they cooled. Such a process would be cost prohibitive.
A further drawback of recreating the steel U-shape with PP-R material is that the resultant product loses the flexibility inherent in having a pair of pipes freely projecting from a single mounting point. If created in a U shape, the PP-R pipe would be too rigid a product.